Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
The Hong Kong Motion Pictures Industry Association (MPIA) is urging the world’s largest video-sharing website, YouTube, to enforce international copyright infringement measures after finding footage from some of its blockbuster box-office hits like Love in the Buff and some 200 other films available for free online. This week, the HK association blamed YouTube for estimated losses of $308 million, adding that YouTube was slow to remove the illegally uploaded version of Love in the Buff, even after Media Asia, the film’s producers, filed a formal complaint. HK filmmakers say a recent search found some of their most popular hits available on the Google-owned YouTube servers, including Hong Kong Film Awards winners: A Simple Life, The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, Echoes of the Rainbow, and Shaolin Soccer. Blockbuster Ip Man and its sequel were split into 107 video files, while the pirated YouTube videos of clubbing drama Lan Kwai Fong and Jet Li’s Fearless received 1.8 million and 1.4 million hits, respectively. A classic fight scene from Bruce Lee’s Way of the Dragon was viewed 4.8 million times. (The Hollywood Reporter – HK Piracy)
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Ramping up for its gala opening next month, developers this week gave domestic and foreign journos a heart-stopping over quarter-mile ride up, up, way up to the observation level of Japan’s latest entry into the ongoing “biggest and longest” competition among industrialized nations ~ the 634-meter-tall (2,080 feet) Tokyo SkyTree. White-knuckled reporters boarded the SkyTree’s high-speed elevators with nervous smiles and waited a minute and 20 seconds to be lifted to the imposing tower’s observation level 1,476-feet above the metropolis. Earthquake’s? The Skytree survived last March’s 9.0 with no damage. The SkyTree has a restaurant and two cafes on the observation decks, a vertigo-inducing glass floor that lets vomitous visitors look straight down and an emergency staircase with 2,523 steps just in case you’re in the mood for a workout. Yomiuri Shimbun has video of the high-level junket (in Japanese but the flyover footage really doesn’t need translating) and HuffPo has a writeup and a slideshow.
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Happy Earth Day! Here’s an example of human ingenuity coming up with sustainable concepts for generating electrical power with the wind. No longer will we be limited by static windmill tech and wind-friendly terrain. High-altitude turbine blimps from Altaeros Energies are now being flight tested, and when these beautiful craft go on line, they could cut our energy costs by a whopping 65%. (Gizmodo – turbine blimps)
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Sometimes, simple videos like this are just fun to watch. Honestly, we could have used more info on what he’s doing. Are they wristwatches or just pocketwatches? What’s his vending situation like? But at a few minutes, it’s a beautiful piece. The Watchmaker from Dustin Cohen on Vimeo.
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[youtube]8qx23sJfiLs[/youtube] UFO Over South Korea. The video has over 2 million hits. It looks like a flying hat. A person from NASA says it’s space junk? Don’t you have to be in space for that?
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